Posts Tagged ‘ethnic cleansing’

Yesterday on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos substitute host Jake Tapper interviewed Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Bush could not have been more gracious in praising Obama’s relief efforts.

In other words, he didn’t try to do to Obama what Obama and the Democrats so viciously did to him.

And I couldn’t help but wonder: if Democrats believed their own crap about Bush and Katrina, why on earth would they be asking George Bush to lead an effort for Haitian relief now?

It has now been six days since the earthquake that destroyed Haiti. Obama promised an unprecedented massive effort to provide emergency relief.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. relief effort after the Haiti earthquake started too slowly and cautiously, says a retired general who led the military relief effort on the Gulf Coast after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

“The next morning after the earthquake, as a military man of 37 years service, I assumed … there would be airplanes delivering aid, not troops, but aid,” said retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who coordinated military operations after disaster struck the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005. “What we saw instead was discussion about, ‘Well we’ve got to send an assessment team in to see what the needs are.’ And anytime I hear that, my head turns red.”

The problem, Honore told USA TODAY, is that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, instead of the military, take the lead in international disaster response.

“I was a little frustrated to hear that USAID was the lead agency,” he said. “I respect them, but they’re not a rapid deployment unit.”

USAID immediately dispatched an assessment team and search-and-rescue teams, but there has still not been widespread distribution of food or water, three days after the Haiti earthquake.

Let’s file that as a ‘no’.

Very little in the way of actual lifesaving supplies had gone out as of the time of that article. Has that situation improved?

So how about it, Martha? Is the relief effort getting to those who need it most?

RADDATZ: Well, we actually went with a convoy, one truckload of supplies yesterday. We arrived really early in the morning, expecting to track this truck, come back, and go out with another truck. It took us five-and-a-half hours to get these supplies where they were needed.

How many days did Bush get before Democrats hatefully and viciously attacked him?

Well, are they at least providing security for the relief supplies yet to come?

Another exchange during the ABC program between Jake Tapper and Martha Raddatz:

TAPPER: Speaking of chaos, Martha, we keep hearing about reports of sporadic violence. Where is the U.S. military in all this? Are they making attempts to secure the island?

RADDATZ: Absolutely not, Jake. They really aren’t. I keep hearing these numbers. There are about 4,200 American military supporting this mission, but mostly they’re out on the ships. They’re on the cutters. You’ve got the 82nd Airborne, not all of the 82nd Airborne, a brigade, about 3,500 soldiers are here. They’re expected to be here sometime next week. The Marines are not yet here, 2,200 Marines.

Jake Tapper pointed out to the US military commander for the region, General Keen, that:

General Keen, I’d like to go to you first. Martha Raddatz just reported that U.S. troops are not out there securing Haiti, even though there are sporadic outbursts of violence, some of them horrific. We heard a report of — in Petionville, a suburb of Port- au-Prince, a policeman handed over a suspected looter to an angry crowd. They stripped him, beat him, and set him on fire. We’ve also heard that some medical personnel are clearing the area because they don’t feel secure.

Sounds like another rather big ‘no’ vote.

I think I’ve amply proven the case that a week after the Haiti disaster a great deal separates what has been done from what could have been done. I can’t help but remember how bitterly the left attacked Bush for the same failures following an unprecedented natural disaster.

The left ignored the fact that Hurricane Katrina was a supermassive disaster that simply overwhelmed the resources of the federal government regardless of who was in charge of it. They ignored the fact that Bill Clinton hadn’t prepared New Orleans for such a disaster any better than George Bush did. They ignored the fact that the heavily Democratic city of New Orleans and state of Louisiana had utterly failed to prepare, when such preparation should have been at the very core of their agenda. They ignored details such as this:

The vultures of the venomous left are attacking on two fronts, first that the president didn’t do what the incompetent mayor of New Orleans and the pouty governor of Louisiana should have done, and didn’t, in the early hours after Katrina loosed the deluge on the city that care and good judgment forgot. Ray Nagin, the mayor, ordered a “mandatory” evacuation a day late, but kept the city’s 2,000 school buses parked and locked in neat rows when there was still time to take the refugees to higher ground. The bright-yellow buses sit ruined now in four feet of dirty water.

They ignored everything but their ideological agenda and the political axe-to-grind they had in their hands to swing at George Bush with.

And the propagandistic mainstream media helped them do it.

The same media that basically demanded that George Bush push a button and FIX New Orleans have gone out of their way to make excuses for the numerous failures in Haiti under Obama.

What is funny is that it was largely the attacks against Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina that led to the Democrat takeover of the House and the Senate in 2006.

Unemployment was 4.7% when the Democrats took over Congress. It was 4.7% when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid assumed their respective majority leadership positions. They have been in control of Congress ever since: and what is unemployment at now?

The Democrat Party/lamestream media narrative is that Bush was responsible for the economic meltdown because it happened during his watch. There was never once a mention that it happened during Nancy Pelosi’s and Harry Reid’s watch. Because that particular narrative doesn’t fit their agenda.

”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

George Bush and John McCain repeatedly warned that if we didn’t address the situation, we would suffer a financial collapse.

These are entities that have demonstrated over and over again that they are deeply in need of reform. For years I have been concerned about the regulatory structure that governs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—known as Government-sponsored entities or GSEs—and the sheer magnitude of these companies and the role they play in the housing market. OFHEO’s report this week does nothing to ease these concerns.

In fact, the report does quite the contrary. OFHEO’s report solidifies my view that the GSEs need to be reformed without delay. I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.

With the fiscal challenges facing us today (deficits, entitlements, pensions and flood insurance), Congress must ask itself who would actually pay this debt if Fannie or Freddie could not?

Substantial testimony calling for improved regulation of the GSEs has been provided to the Senate by the Treasury, Federal Reserve, HUD, GAO, CBO, and others. Congress has the opportunity to recommit itself to the housing mission of the GSEs while at the same time making sure the GSEs operate in a manner that does not expose our financial system, or taxpayers, to unnecessary risk. It is vitally important that Congress take the necessary steps to ensure that these institutions benefit from strong and independent regulatory supervision, operate in a safe and sound manner, and are primarily focused on their statutory mission. More importantly, Congress must ensure that the American taxpayer is protected in the event either GSE should fail. We strongly support an effort to schedule floor time this year to debate GSE regulatory reform.

And they DID fail. They massively, massively failed.

Only about a month before the whole system crashed, Barney Frank went on the record and said this:

REP. BARNEY FRANK, D-MASS.: “I think this is a case where Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, that they are not in danger of going under. They’re not the best investments these days from the long-term standpoint going back. I think they are in good shape going forward.”

But as our economy exploded along with the boondoggle housing finance market artificially sustained by Fannie and Freddie, the Democrats demagogued the Republicans. And the lamestream media duly reported it as though it were all the liberal’s-god-socialist-big-government’s truth.

And thus you see how the liberal demagoguery surrounding Hurricane Katrina led to the liberal demagoguery surrounding the economic collapse.

And even when Obama abandons Haiti to go to Massachusetts to prop up Democrat Martha Coakley’s failing candidacy, Democrats manage to demagogue over Haiti.

Bill Clinton, the Obama-appointed special envoy for Haiti, didn’t bother to go there, but focused on what was far more important: Martha Coakely’s election bid in Massachusetts.

Someone asked Bill Clinton about that, and he said that relief for Haiti and the election of Martha Coalkey in Massachusetts were “just two sides of the same coin.” The blatant and breathtaking politicization is mindboggling!!!

What would the mainstream media be saying about Republican George Bush literally turning his back on a disaster to fly north to Massachusetts to campaign for a Republican – bringing us special envoy to Haiti to do so with him – rather than turn south to deal with the Haiti disaster? What would these demagogues who deceitfully call themselves “journalists” have said?

Even if you’re a liberal, you’re not stupid enough to realize that the media would have unleashed hell on earth to attack George Bush for such a partisan political act of abandonment.

And that’s what I’m really getting at. The double standard between treatment of Democrats and Republicans is so massive it is positively unreal. Obama can screw up every which way and the media will let it pass; Bush could hit a homerun and the media would declare it a foul ball and then attack him for his incredibly poor swing.

Meanwhile, of course, millions of Haitians are suffering, and not getting helped.

Mass graves. Tent cities.More than 90% of the nation’s structures damaged or destroyed. No food.Amputees and orphans left to fend for themselves. Nearly all of the businesses gone. No employment. Yet it still gets worse for the people of Haiti.

Haiti’s Prime Ministery, Jean-Max Bellerive told CNN that he is receiving reports of children being stolen and trafficked as slaves, sex slaves and for the purpose of having their organs harvested to be sold.

“There is organ trafficking for children and other persons also, because they need all types of organs,” Bellerive said.

UNICEF is also reporting that children are being taken from hospitals by traffickers.

Had this happened under George Bush, with these results, the lamestream media would be attacking Bush as the most evil man since Hitler and the most incompetent buffoon since God created incompetent buffoons.

I remember coming across a way to keep the perennially dumb occupied. You simply wrote, “See other side” on a card and hand it to them.

That’s the way liberals are when it comes to America and foreign policy.

Liberal foreign policy consists in two ideas:

1) It is wrong for the United States to ever act unilaterally to resolve a threat to its security.

2) The United States must act in cooperation with the international community to resolve security threats.

But what invariably happens is the “See other side” game. Because:

1) The United States is disallowed from acting preemptively to deal with threats to itself.

2) The international community never does a damn thing until it’s too late to matter.

In the minds of liberals, the United Nations has resolved crisis after crisis. In the minds of conservatives, it has allowed one genocide, crime against humanity, and security crisis to grow out of control after another.

Liberals are wrong. Conservatives are right. But as long as liberals never actually admit that they’re wrong, they feel entitled to continue to play in the game of politics and international relations. And they can continue to dismiss the reality of evil and dither around with moral equivalence.

And thus we come to the story of Russia, and its “peacekeeping operations” in Georgia and South Ossetia.

You may remember that a couple weeks ago the European Union – with France taking the lead – negotiated with Russia to stop occupying Georgia and murdering Georgian people. Displaying all the courage that France has come to epitomize, the negotiation in effect allowed Russia to remain indefinitely in the guise of “peacekeeping.” If the EU ever offers to negotiate on your behalf, if you are wise you will tell them, “No, thank you,” and then run the hell away as fast as your feet will carry you.

Well, this would be a shock to liberals, who believe in international diplomacy far more than they will ever believe in God, but the Russians haven’t been playing very nice.

The Associated Press thought for a while, and finally came up with a neutral word to say, “ETHNIC CLEANSING.”

KSUISI, Georgia – After Georgian soldiers stormed South Ossetia and killed Vitaly Guzitayev’s friend, he hid in the woods. Once the Georgians left, he set fire to the elegant brick homes of ethnic Georgians who lived nearby.

“Georgians must not return here. Ossetia is for Ossetians,” Guzitayev spat, sitting on a bench in Ksuisi two weeks later. “Let Georgians suffer. Now we are independent from them.”

Arson gangs have targeted the homes of ethnic Georgians in breakaway South Ossetia as the conflict over control threatens to erase a centuries-old ethnic mix. Since the warfare between Georgia and Russia in early August, Associated Press reporters have witnessed burning homes and looting in villages in the region.

The conflict has pitted neighbor against neighbor in this region of mountain slopes and fruit orchards where two ethnic groups have lived side-by-side for centuries: Georgians whose culture is rooted on the Black Sea coast and Ossetians whose language and customs point to the east.

According to Georgia, at least 28,800 ethnic Georgians have fled South Ossetia in recent weeks, part of a larger exodus of some 160,000 people from the conflict zone. South Ossetian officials say the region’s population of Georgians was only about 14,000 when the fighting started earlier this month.

Whatever the figure, no one disputes that there are few Georgians left in South Ossetia. And any who try to return will find many of their neighbors hostile, their language despised and their homes destroyed.

Olia Bugadze, 68, is one of a handful of ethnic Georgians left in Ksuisi. She said she hid in a corn field as Russian troops swept through, then watched as neighbors descended on her home, looted it and set it on fire. Now she camps in the ruins of her kitchen.

“I am afraid,” said Bugadze, clad in a worn-out black shirt and skirt, as she showed a visitor the destruction. “Every day they threaten me and want to drive me out of Ossetia.”

Georgian officials say some ethnic Georgian men were summarily shot by militia fighters in the aftermath of the fighting, a claim that the AP was not immediately able to independently confirm.

However, an AP reporter saw dozens of ethnic Georgians — all middle-aged or older men — who were rounded up after the fighting and held in the basements of South Ossetia’s Interior Ministry.

They were forced to haul debris on streets bombed-out by Georgian rockets and artillery. The AP saw at least three such groups escorted by armed South Ossetian policemen.

Asmat Babutsidze lived in the hamlet Achabeti, a predominantly Georgian village in South Ossetia. After the fighting ended, she said, men with guns looted and torched her home and took her to a jail in Tskhinvali.

There, she said, she was locked in a basement cell with 43 other women, most of them — like her — ethnic Georgians.

Guards, she told the AP in an interview in Tbilisi, mocked and kicked the hostages. Women were forced to sweep the glass-littered streets, she said, while men were made to bury the dead.

South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity said some Georgian civilians were detained for their own protection, not as part of an effort at collective punishment. “The Interior Ministry protected them to save their lives,” he said.

But Kokoity also said any ethnic Georgian civilians who sided with Georgian military forces will not be allowed to return. “We warned them in advance,” he said.

David Sanakoyev, a South Ossetian government official, said a total of 182 Georgian civilians were detained for their own protection and that they were eventually bused to the Georgian side. The last group of 85 men was escorted to Georgia on Wednesday, he said.

Georgian officials charge there was a coordinated campaign against ethnic Georgian civilians in Ossetian- and Russian-controlled areas.

“It was a concerted action of Russian official military forces together with paramilitaries,” Eka Tkeshelashvili, a senior Georgian government official, said at a meeting in Europe in Vienna this week.

Over the past three weeks, AP reporters have witnessed burning homes in more than half a dozen Georgian villages. On Aug. 11, an AP reporter saw looting by armed men in Georgian villages north of the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali — as Russian troops stood by.

Another AP reporter saw burning and looting of Georgian homes in at least six separate areas from Aug. 22 through Thursday: the villages of Achabetiug, Kekhvi, Tamarasheni, Ksuisi and Eregvi, as well as near the capital Tskhinvali.

With most Georgians gone, there seems to be an effort to erase even the memory of their presence here. On Thursday, a South Ossetian policeman knocked down a sign with the name of the Georgian village of Tamasheni, written in both Georgian and Latin scripts, as bulldozers razed the last remaining houses. At least three more Georgian villages have been bulldozed in South Ossetia, witnesses said.

Human Rights Watch said Ossetian militias have been involved in systematic persecution of ethnic Georgian civilians.

“They aim at pushing Georgians out of their villages, to make sure they have no place to return to,” researcher Tatyana Lokshina said.

Rachel Denber, deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia division of Human Rights Watch, said satellite images confirm militia attacks on ethnic Georgian villages in South Ossetia and “emphasize the need for Russian authorities to hold these militias accountable.”

A Human Rights Watch team visited five Georgian villages in South Ossetia from Aug. 12-17, she said, taking photographs and interviewing victims. The team witnessed looting and burning in two of the villages, Tamareshni and Kekhvi.

Until the last years of the Soviet Union, Georgians and Ossetians had lived peacefully. But as reforms weakened Moscow’s grip, Ossetians and Georgians formed nationalist movements, each staking a claim to their shared homeland.

After Ossetia declared its independence, Georgian forces invaded, launching a full-scale war that ended in 1992 in a Kremlin-brokered deal that divided the region. South Ossetia fell within Georgia’s borders, but operated with wide autonomy. North Ossetia came under Moscow’s control.

The uneasy peace that followed was marked by sporadic clashes, which intensified when Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili came to power four years ago, vowing to assert Tbilisi’s authority over Georgia’s separatist regions. This only stoked animosity among South Ossetians, who believe Georgia has no right to rule them.

On Aug. 7, Georgian forces launched a devastating rocket and artillery assault on South Ossetia’s capital of Tskhinvali. Russia mounted a massive military response, sending hundreds of armored vehicles south across Georgia’s border and driving the Georgians deep into their own territory.

The Russians have accused the Georgians of attempting genocide, saying the barrage targeted Tshkinvali’s hospital and residential neighborhoods. They say its tanks rolled over people alive, and fired into basements where Ossetian families cowered.

South Ossetian officials and the Russian military say they have done their best to discourage looting and arson and to protect Georgian residents of the breakaway republic, despite the popular anger at what they say was Georgia’s effort to destroy them as a people.

“We are not barbarians,” Kokoity told the AP this week.

South Ossetian officials say 1,692 civilians were killed and some 1,500 wounded in Georgia’s military assault — which devastated some Tskhinvali neighborhoods. At first Russia said about 2,000 Ossetian civilians had been killed. But on Aug. 20, it reduced that figure to 133 confirmed dead.

“The truth is no one knows,” Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner, told reporters in Moscow Thursday.

In Soviet times, Ksuisi residents say, Ossetians and Georgians lived harmoniously in the prosperous village surrounded by corn fields, grapevines and orchids with peaches and apples.

Now the some 400 homes in the hamlet’s Georgian quarter appear to have been burned and looted. Of about 700 Ossetian houses, a small number — including a school — bore the marks of damage from Georgian artillery fire.

The mother of Guzitayev’s friend, Lenya Doguzov, clutched the earth and wailed in an orchard that had been her son’s grave site before his body was moved to a cemetery.

“Georgians should lie next to my son,” Yekaterina Doguzova, 70, said bitterly as she grieved alongside her daughter-in-law Zemfira Doguzova, 34.

Pavel Panikaev, 73, angrily recalled how Georgians beat him with rifle butts. “We have a right for revenge,” he said. “We will not leave Georgian houses, orchards, nothing. We will erase them from the face of earth.”

Lena Kudakhova, 67, of Ksuisi was married to a Georgian man killed in the recent fighting. Now her half-Georgian daughter is in hiding nearby, fearing retaliation, and her half-Georgian son has fled to the Georgian capital of Tbilisi.

She wonders what will happen to her. “Nobody needs me in an independent Ossetia,” she said.
___
Associated Press writers Mansur Mirovalev and Maria Danilova in Moscow, and Jim Heintz and Misha Dzhindzhikhashvili in Tbilisi, Georgia, contributed to this report.

I kid you not. Even as the Russians are basically tearing new orifices into Georgia on an hourly basis, and setting up the toppling of a previously democratic government in favor of a puppet, Iran is busily working on developing their nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. Given their ability to stop traffic in the oil-critical Strait of Hormuz at will, and given their penchant for terrorism and insanity, a nuclear-armed Iran is absolutely unacceptable.

If they are allowed to develop nuclear weapons and the corresponding delivery systems, Iran will be able to launch destabilizing terrorist attacks or drive up oil prices to stratospheric levels with impunity.

But liberals will continue to play the “See other side” game with the international community.

Meanwhile, Georgia is still burning. And no one is doing a damn thing to prevent it.